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I was officially diagnosed with depression about five years ago or so even though I've had it pretty much most of my twenty-six years of life. There is no point to this text actually; most of the time, when people talk about their depression is to let people know that it's going to be okay and it doesn't last forever, and there's always ways to overcome it, and please don't kill yourself.
I have nothing against positive messages, they are extremely necessary, but if you have depression for as long as I've had it, you know it doesn't get better. Depression doesn't just go away, and that's something I wish sometimes people would talk about more. There are a lot of neat messages from when your depression is not so bad, for when you feel like fighting it, but not really much for when you're deep in the hole and are getting ready to be comfy there for a while. "How to get out of a hole you want to be in?" There should be a book with that name (is there? Someone send it my way).
The thing with depression is that you don't always want to feel better. Sometimes you are so deep in your own head that you don't see the point on wanting to feel better (or on feeling better). This doesn't always mean you want to die, and there is a fundamental difference between wanting to die and wanting to not exist that is not addressed when we talk about suicidal behaviors. Wanting to kill yourself is an active thought, from my experience. I haven't wanted (or tried) to kill myself in many years. I have, however, wished I didn't exist quite often. Wishing to vanish from existence is rather a passive thought. You sit there, you look around, you feel miserable all the way down to your bones, and then you decide you don't want to be. You want yourself to stop existing, which mustn't be confused with wanting to die. Wanting to die implies to have had existed, implies doing something to stop being. Wanting to vanish is the illogical and not-very-realistic idea of suddenly disappearing from existence. When I wish to disappear I'm not wishing to die, I'm not trying to kill myself or plotting my own dismissal, I'm just sitting there hoping I can stop being part of everything at least for a while.
They are both miserable thoughts, but one is listened to, and the other one is so ridiculous nobody who hasn't felt it understands what you're talking about unless you explain it with great detail--and more often than not they still think you want to kill yourself.
I can't use the phrase "not to be a downer" because I probably am trying to be a downer right this second and I can't bring myself to feel bad about it either. If you have the type of depression I have, the one that comes and doesn't go, it's just softer sometimes and then worst other times, you know there's no helping it, you have to engage in sadness from time to time because it is all you can feel.
The problem is that people will try to tell us how to fix the problem and we know it cannot be fixed. I'm not trying to kill myself and I'm a positive person most of the time, but I do have depression and there is no cure for that. Some days I remember I have to live with that for the rest of my life, and then the days when I'm feeling the worst become longer and heavier and more unbearable, because they aren't alone; this is not a single day that I'm feeling bad, it's just one of many more I've had and many more I will have. And therapists tell you to live for the good days, not for the bad ones, but the bad days are still there. I cannot just ignore the bad days. They will keep coming, and more often than you'd like you cannot be prepared for them; there is no getting ready for a bad day, it hits you on the face like a ton of bricks and it comes out of nowhere. You are fine one second and the next you don't understand the meaning and purpose of your own existence and everything you've done with your life is meaningless.
It would have been nice if someone had told me that at some point. "Just so you know, you're going to be miserable some days no matter what you do" "Heads up, there will be mood swings and you will forget sentences from five seconds ago like they were told to you when you were two years old" "Sometimes, you will be hyper-aware of how meaningless life and everything you do actually is."
Life is not meaningless, of course. We don't know the meaning of it, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless. There are all sorts of things to do and all sorts of things you can enjoy. But here is the thing: when you have depression, the things you enjoy become a chore.
I've been in therapy for a while, and one of the first things that you have to try to get better is do things you love. Do things that make you feel good. I think there's a lot of "distracting yourself from the pain of life" in therapy.
I tried everything. It sounds like an exaggeration because obviously you never want to think you've tried everything you could possibly do to get better, but there things that must be taken into consideration: First, "everything" is a giant grey area. Second, depression makes you too damn tired, and "trying everything" is something that takes up a lot of energy, so my "everything" and your "everything" may not look anything alike.
Third. Today I feel like talking about all the things I've tried and how I'm still feeling miserable. Not only how I'm still feeling miserable but how I may have lost all love I had for doing anything. In this, it's important to consider that when we say "I can't" we actually mean we literally cannot. There is a physical force that pushes us back, and no matter how much you try, when you're deep in the hole, there is just no doing of any kind. We need to talk about this moments as much as we talk about the moment we got better, because we forget to tell ourselves that we are not always better, and we won't always be fine, and then when we are not fine we think we have failed at everything.
I do not have a recovery story. I have gotten better, in a sense; I don't spend days in bed, not showering and crying, for one thing. I call that getting better, but it's hardly becoming a functional human being. I have had accomplishments that should probably make me proud and that other people have congratulated me for, but they hardly seem like anything important to me; they look like things I was supposed to do, somehow. No matter how big the thing is, it looks like something silly that anyone else (literally anyone else) could have done with way less effort and better results. I try to look at them like they are something important, and to remember that I, me, I put a lot of effort and work in them, that I did something. That I am doing things. It doesn't work most of the time; more often than not I think I could have done something better, or that I'm not cut for the job.
Example: I got an internship in one of the oldest literary magazines in the country. It sounds fancy, even though we all know internships seldom are as fancy as they sound (it was us sitting on our butts for nine hours a week, reading submissions). The thing is, not everyone gets these things, and I did, and I should feel accomplished, I should feel entitled to feeling accomplished, but I do not. I've gotten many things in school, for which I work hard, and still I hardly feel excited about most of them.
I was given an award for creative non-fiction piece I wrote.
I was invited to read to two formal events.
I was published in a silly magazine because apparently my poetry is decent.
I got a few monetary prizes.
All these things sound big when I write them down, and yet they feel like out-of-body experiences. Like it wasn't me the one who did the thing.
Now, when I say I've tried everything, I mean everything I could think of.
I still lost the love I had for doing things. Doing things and not having them make you feel better is nowhere near as painful as doing things you use to love and discover now you're too tired and done with life to appreciate them. So consider: if you loved something, you tried it to maybe feel better, and then you don't feel better no matter how much you do it, you try, or you love it, you end up not really loving it anymore. It's like your love for the thing is broken and there's no way to fix it. Like it failed you, or rather like you failed it by not enjoying it as much.
Then you just stop doing the thing. Because the joy of doing it is not there anymore no matter how much you try.
I used to enjoy listening to the radio, and now I don't, not really.
I used to read book after book. It was the only thing I wanted to do, it was a refuge, a place I could be. I don't think most people can understand how painful it is to pick up a book and discover you're incapable of enjoying it anymore. You're incapable of losing yourself in the pages, of paying attention, of not getting distracted. You're not capable of reading the thing, get to the fifth chapter, and still remember the chapters before that. You forget what just happened. And then you don't have the energy to read it again. You want to keep reading, but everything feels so heavy you know you won't like it if you keep reading. Reading is all I wanted to do with my life.
I tried painting and gardening, like they tell you in therapy. I tried coloring books and journals. I tried going out by myself and I tried socializing. I tried cooking (which I'm quite good at). I tried working and then not working. I tried exercising, bought a bike, went to the playgrounds. I drink water everyday and I eat fruits and veggies, and I tried taking baths and using oils. I tried meditation, which you can't really do when you're brain won't shut up. I tried yoga, and then didn't feel like doing it anymore because all the damn people who do yoga always feel like being too damn positive, when most of them are just stealing from sacred millenary practices that have deep spiritual meanings they don't really understand. I tried going to the movies. And I try writing.
There is not a single solution and there is nothing that will work forever, and more often than not I find myself unable to do anything I like doing. And I guess because I'm feeling down I would like people to talk less about how you get over depression and how it will get better, and more about the times we will fail at getting over it. The times we will willingly go back to it and embrace it because we can't do better those days. The times we fall in the hole no matter how much better we thought we were doing. I want people to talk about how there's no cure for this, and how even if you take medications and you try your best, sometimes you don't feel any better. I want people to acknowledge that more often, so we can get used to that feeling. The us, being miserable because that's how depression works. Us, hating ourselves maybe, because we don't know how to love the things we used to love anymore. Us, crying because we don't know what to do.
I want us to think about the bad days prepare ourselves in the hope that, when they come, we may be a bit more ready.
I have nothing against positive messages, they are extremely necessary, but if you have depression for as long as I've had it, you know it doesn't get better. Depression doesn't just go away, and that's something I wish sometimes people would talk about more. There are a lot of neat messages from when your depression is not so bad, for when you feel like fighting it, but not really much for when you're deep in the hole and are getting ready to be comfy there for a while. "How to get out of a hole you want to be in?" There should be a book with that name (is there? Someone send it my way).
The thing with depression is that you don't always want to feel better. Sometimes you are so deep in your own head that you don't see the point on wanting to feel better (or on feeling better). This doesn't always mean you want to die, and there is a fundamental difference between wanting to die and wanting to not exist that is not addressed when we talk about suicidal behaviors. Wanting to kill yourself is an active thought, from my experience. I haven't wanted (or tried) to kill myself in many years. I have, however, wished I didn't exist quite often. Wishing to vanish from existence is rather a passive thought. You sit there, you look around, you feel miserable all the way down to your bones, and then you decide you don't want to be. You want yourself to stop existing, which mustn't be confused with wanting to die. Wanting to die implies to have had existed, implies doing something to stop being. Wanting to vanish is the illogical and not-very-realistic idea of suddenly disappearing from existence. When I wish to disappear I'm not wishing to die, I'm not trying to kill myself or plotting my own dismissal, I'm just sitting there hoping I can stop being part of everything at least for a while.
They are both miserable thoughts, but one is listened to, and the other one is so ridiculous nobody who hasn't felt it understands what you're talking about unless you explain it with great detail--and more often than not they still think you want to kill yourself.
I can't use the phrase "not to be a downer" because I probably am trying to be a downer right this second and I can't bring myself to feel bad about it either. If you have the type of depression I have, the one that comes and doesn't go, it's just softer sometimes and then worst other times, you know there's no helping it, you have to engage in sadness from time to time because it is all you can feel.
The problem is that people will try to tell us how to fix the problem and we know it cannot be fixed. I'm not trying to kill myself and I'm a positive person most of the time, but I do have depression and there is no cure for that. Some days I remember I have to live with that for the rest of my life, and then the days when I'm feeling the worst become longer and heavier and more unbearable, because they aren't alone; this is not a single day that I'm feeling bad, it's just one of many more I've had and many more I will have. And therapists tell you to live for the good days, not for the bad ones, but the bad days are still there. I cannot just ignore the bad days. They will keep coming, and more often than you'd like you cannot be prepared for them; there is no getting ready for a bad day, it hits you on the face like a ton of bricks and it comes out of nowhere. You are fine one second and the next you don't understand the meaning and purpose of your own existence and everything you've done with your life is meaningless.
It would have been nice if someone had told me that at some point. "Just so you know, you're going to be miserable some days no matter what you do" "Heads up, there will be mood swings and you will forget sentences from five seconds ago like they were told to you when you were two years old" "Sometimes, you will be hyper-aware of how meaningless life and everything you do actually is."
Life is not meaningless, of course. We don't know the meaning of it, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless. There are all sorts of things to do and all sorts of things you can enjoy. But here is the thing: when you have depression, the things you enjoy become a chore.
I've been in therapy for a while, and one of the first things that you have to try to get better is do things you love. Do things that make you feel good. I think there's a lot of "distracting yourself from the pain of life" in therapy.
I tried everything. It sounds like an exaggeration because obviously you never want to think you've tried everything you could possibly do to get better, but there things that must be taken into consideration: First, "everything" is a giant grey area. Second, depression makes you too damn tired, and "trying everything" is something that takes up a lot of energy, so my "everything" and your "everything" may not look anything alike.
Third. Today I feel like talking about all the things I've tried and how I'm still feeling miserable. Not only how I'm still feeling miserable but how I may have lost all love I had for doing anything. In this, it's important to consider that when we say "I can't" we actually mean we literally cannot. There is a physical force that pushes us back, and no matter how much you try, when you're deep in the hole, there is just no doing of any kind. We need to talk about this moments as much as we talk about the moment we got better, because we forget to tell ourselves that we are not always better, and we won't always be fine, and then when we are not fine we think we have failed at everything.
I do not have a recovery story. I have gotten better, in a sense; I don't spend days in bed, not showering and crying, for one thing. I call that getting better, but it's hardly becoming a functional human being. I have had accomplishments that should probably make me proud and that other people have congratulated me for, but they hardly seem like anything important to me; they look like things I was supposed to do, somehow. No matter how big the thing is, it looks like something silly that anyone else (literally anyone else) could have done with way less effort and better results. I try to look at them like they are something important, and to remember that I, me, I put a lot of effort and work in them, that I did something. That I am doing things. It doesn't work most of the time; more often than not I think I could have done something better, or that I'm not cut for the job.
Example: I got an internship in one of the oldest literary magazines in the country. It sounds fancy, even though we all know internships seldom are as fancy as they sound (it was us sitting on our butts for nine hours a week, reading submissions). The thing is, not everyone gets these things, and I did, and I should feel accomplished, I should feel entitled to feeling accomplished, but I do not. I've gotten many things in school, for which I work hard, and still I hardly feel excited about most of them.
I was given an award for creative non-fiction piece I wrote.
I was invited to read to two formal events.
I was published in a silly magazine because apparently my poetry is decent.
I got a few monetary prizes.
All these things sound big when I write them down, and yet they feel like out-of-body experiences. Like it wasn't me the one who did the thing.
Now, when I say I've tried everything, I mean everything I could think of.
I still lost the love I had for doing things. Doing things and not having them make you feel better is nowhere near as painful as doing things you use to love and discover now you're too tired and done with life to appreciate them. So consider: if you loved something, you tried it to maybe feel better, and then you don't feel better no matter how much you do it, you try, or you love it, you end up not really loving it anymore. It's like your love for the thing is broken and there's no way to fix it. Like it failed you, or rather like you failed it by not enjoying it as much.
Then you just stop doing the thing. Because the joy of doing it is not there anymore no matter how much you try.
I used to enjoy listening to the radio, and now I don't, not really.
I used to read book after book. It was the only thing I wanted to do, it was a refuge, a place I could be. I don't think most people can understand how painful it is to pick up a book and discover you're incapable of enjoying it anymore. You're incapable of losing yourself in the pages, of paying attention, of not getting distracted. You're not capable of reading the thing, get to the fifth chapter, and still remember the chapters before that. You forget what just happened. And then you don't have the energy to read it again. You want to keep reading, but everything feels so heavy you know you won't like it if you keep reading. Reading is all I wanted to do with my life.
I tried painting and gardening, like they tell you in therapy. I tried coloring books and journals. I tried going out by myself and I tried socializing. I tried cooking (which I'm quite good at). I tried working and then not working. I tried exercising, bought a bike, went to the playgrounds. I drink water everyday and I eat fruits and veggies, and I tried taking baths and using oils. I tried meditation, which you can't really do when you're brain won't shut up. I tried yoga, and then didn't feel like doing it anymore because all the damn people who do yoga always feel like being too damn positive, when most of them are just stealing from sacred millenary practices that have deep spiritual meanings they don't really understand. I tried going to the movies. And I try writing.
There is not a single solution and there is nothing that will work forever, and more often than not I find myself unable to do anything I like doing. And I guess because I'm feeling down I would like people to talk less about how you get over depression and how it will get better, and more about the times we will fail at getting over it. The times we will willingly go back to it and embrace it because we can't do better those days. The times we fall in the hole no matter how much better we thought we were doing. I want people to talk about how there's no cure for this, and how even if you take medications and you try your best, sometimes you don't feel any better. I want people to acknowledge that more often, so we can get used to that feeling. The us, being miserable because that's how depression works. Us, hating ourselves maybe, because we don't know how to love the things we used to love anymore. Us, crying because we don't know what to do.
I want us to think about the bad days prepare ourselves in the hope that, when they come, we may be a bit more ready.
